How to Stay Productive as a Writer (Writing Tips For When It Feels Impossible)

Procrastination gets blamed on laziness a lot, but mine is usually much more industrious. I can reorganize notes, research something tangentially related to the chapter, answer email, tweak a website, decide my desk has suddenly become intolerable, and spend twenty minutes solving a problem that did not exist when I sat down.

All while technically working.

This is one of the stranger things about writing for a living. There is always something productive I could be doing, which means procrastination can wear a very convincing disguise. The trick is figuring out whether I’m doing useful work or simply avoiding the thing that currently feels hard.

I’ve picked up a few ways to catch myself at it.

When procrastination is actually a clue

When I’m resisting a writing session, I ask myself a question that sounds almost too simple: What happens if I don’t do this today?

Sometimes the answer is nothing dramatic. Life is busy. I’m tired. My brain has reached capacity, and forcing another thousand words out of it is unlikely to improve either the book or my personality.

Other times, the question exposes the real problem. Maybe I don’t know what happens next in the story. Maybe I know a scene isn’t working and don’t want to admit I need to tear it apart. Maybe I’m avoiding a decision because whichever way I go will close off another possibility.

That’s useful information because a time-management problem and a story problem are not the same thing. No productivity hack is going to fix the second one, and pretending it will usually just gives me a more organized way to avoid the manuscript.

I’m also not above bribery. At one point, I lined gummy bears across my keyboard and rewarded myself as I hit small writing goals. I wish I could tell you I have evolved beyond this, but I have not.

There’s a reason rewards work. Sometimes the brain needs a little help associating effort with something pleasant, especially when the larger payoff is months away and currently exists as a document nobody else has seen. The reward doesn’t have to be candy. An episode of something I’m watching, time with a book, a walk, whatever works. I’m not particularly interested in whether the system sounds sophisticated if it gets me through a stubborn chapter.

For the record, “gummy bear performance incentives” looks much more respectable on a quarterly report.

Make the work easier to start

Writing became easier to protect when I stopped treating it as the thing I would do after everything else was finished, because everything else is never finished.

I block writing time on my calendar. My family knows that a closed door and earbuds generally mean I’m unavailable unless someone is bleeding, something is on fire, or the dog has developed a new and legally complicated hobby. The calendar block doesn’t guarantee good writing. It simply gives the writing a place in the day before email, errands, marketing, and assorted digital nonsense consume it.

That matters even more now that writing is also a business. I’m either working in the business, actually writing the books, or on the business, handling publishing, marketing, the website, newsletter, and everything else required to make sure readers know the books exist. Both matter, and both are perfectly capable of cannibalizing each other.

If I spend an entire week designing something beautiful for the website while the manuscript remains untouched, I may have been productive. I was just productive at the wrong thing.

Timers help for the same reason calendar blocks do. They make the work smaller. Twenty-five minutes of writing feels manageable even when “work on novel” feels enormous. I’ve used the Pomodoro technique, longer blocks, shorter sprints, and occasionally the highly sophisticated method of telling myself I only have to fix one paragraph.

Often, once I start, momentum takes over. If it doesn’t, I still did twenty-five minutes, which is better than spending those same twenty-five minutes researching a new note-taking app I absolutely do not need.

The workspace matters too, although I’m not convinced anyone needs a perfect writing cave. I care more about reducing friction: decent lighting, a comfortable chair, headphones when I need them, notes within reach, and pens I actually like using. I have certain pens reserved for writing-related notes, which serves no rational purpose whatsoever beyond making my brain happy, so obviously I’m keeping them.

The more I write, the less interested I become in finding the perfect productivity system. I’m much more interested in understanding my own weird machinery. I know that difficult story decisions can suddenly make administrative work look fascinating. Deadlines help me. Starting small helps me. Timers work. Rewards work. Sometimes taking the afternoon off is smarter than forcing myself through a problem I haven’t solved yet.

And sometimes I just need to stop negotiating with myself and write the damn scene.

That may be the least sophisticated productivity advice I have. It is also annoyingly effective.

Some days the words come easily. Other days I have to lure them out with a timer, a closed door, and confectionery incentives. Either way, the work gets done.